THE LIFE
Born under the name Betty Jean Jennings she was the sixth child out of seven of William Smith Jennings and Lula May Spainhower. Bartik was raised in rural Missouri and she graduated at high school at only 16 years old. She attended Northwest Missouri State Teachers College where she received a math degree. In 1945, Bartik left for Philadelphia and began working on the ENIAC project, forming part of a crucial group of women programmers. With her group she designed many fundamental programs. After she also worked on BINAC and UNIVAC. She died in 2011 after some health issues.
AT WORK
In 1945 she joint the army because they were searching for human calculators even though she could easily became a math teacher. Her job was to calculate balistic trajectories. For this reason she was selected for the ENIAC progect. The Electronic Numeric Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was developed precisely to calculate the ballistic trajectories that until then were processed by human computers (Human computers) such as Bartik by hand. Jean Bartik was asked to develop scenarios for the ENIAC which always had to be programmed by hand in the hardware. With her there was other 6 woman. The six women who worked on the ENIAC project developed subroutines, nesting processes and other fundamental programming techniques and probably invented the discipline of programming today's digital computers
THE DIFFICULTY
Jean Bartik during hes career had to come across a lot of obstacles. First she was a woman in a world full of men. During that time this type of feature where considered less important. When she worked there they didn't tell her all the information about the machines that she and her collegues were working on. They had to figure it out themself. At first they didn't even give them the proper space to work so they had to use unused room and all the place they could find.
HOME
webography: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bartik